THE BUTLER DIVORCE CASE.
ILL-ASSORTED marriage, domestic dissension hardening into in- difference if not hatred, bondage without hope of release,—such fate is too common for proceedings like those in the case of Butler versus Butler in the Court of Common Pleas at Philadelphia, not to possess intense interest. Numbers will have devoured the report in the Morning Chronicle of last Saturday ; half-envying, half-compassionating, the publicity which exposes the household misery to shame, but relieves the pent-up endurance. On the first blush, there is something anomalous in the case : Mr. Butler. appears to be the one who has most manifestly offended against the matrimonial law, yet he is the party seeking divorce ; Mrs. Butler represents herself as the injured wife, yet she resists divorce. On looking into the facts, however, the general circum- stances appear to be byno means uncommon.
Mr. Butler alleges that his wife's demeanour has been charac- terized by bad temper ; that since November 1843 she had been " in the constant practice of abusing him in the strongest lan- guage to every person that would listen to her "; she had con- sorted with persons hostile to him ; she had interfered with his domestic arrangements; she had invented injurious reports against a governess whom he had engaged to teach his children ; she had violated her maternal duties by leaving his house ; she had disregarded the stipulations which she accepted as the conditions of her return ; she intended to publish remarks condemnatory of slavery, he deriving his income from estates worked by slaves ; and that, without sufficient cause, she had left him for a space of more than two years. The last allegation is technically taken as the one on which to found the demand for divorce; the law of Pennsylvania recognizing it as adequate reason for releasing the party deserted. In bar of the suit, Mrs. Butler alleges that she had been forced to withdraw, in consequence of her husband's wrongful conduct ; that she had done so with his knowledge and assent, and that his treatment was so cruel as to justify her in removing from his house. In a narrative which she placed before the Court as an answer to his "libel," she describes his conduct : according to this narra- tive, he had treated her with neglect for some years before 1842; in the October of that year she found that he had been unfaith- ful, even before her married life became unhappy; from that October his affection was utterly alienated; they altogether ceased to live together as man and wife ; he treated her with rudeness and slight before others ; purposely taught their chil- dren, girls, to disregard her authority ; he did his best to alienate her children's affection from her and to debar her from access to them : he thus drove her away from home ; he exacted harsh con- ditions when her conjugal or maternal affection induced her to return, and yet totally violated the compact by keeping her children from her : finally, when she was living apart, he ceased to pay a yearly allowance of 1,000 dollars which he had promised to pay her. The charges are not effectively contradicted on either side ; but met by such recriminations as we have described. It may be held, therefore, that a most unhappy state of domestic intercourse is admitted on both sides. But the most striking inculpations are self-inflicted; each party, in urging the accusation against the other, unconsciously exhibiting some serious fault in the accuser.
Thus, Mrs. Butler, justifying her refusal to answer a question from her husband, admits that " it roused the worst features of her nature"—" pride and resentment." Without any forced con- struction of her letters, they appear to describe a tearful, angry, and didactic importunity : she describes " repeated and in- effectual appeals to his affections, his compassion, his justice, and his humanity "; relates how she was in such a state of nervous excitement as to contemplate suicide ; how, when the husband, the governess, and two children, went•to spend the birthday of the children at a farm'' she consented to follow in a separate car- riage, and watched the children " through the trees " ; once, when the children were ordered to pass her in the streets, she " ran after " and remonstrated with the eldest girl ; how she vindicated her authority on one occasion by sending away a pair of shoes too small for one of the children, and Mr. Butler had the shoes back, to thwart her ; how " her intercourse with her children, through her dependence on his will, became to her a source of constant suffering, disappointment, and bitterness ": she makes it a matter of serious complaint that the children were placed in " a common roadside school," " carrying with them their food, which they were to eat out of their hands ": she refused to join in executing a deed, for which the law of Pennsylvania required her signature,—making that a means of enforcing her claims rs a mother : for want of her allowance, in 1847, she had been ob'iged "to resume the laborious and distaste- ful profession of her youth"; and she wrote to her daughter, a girl of twelve, telling her that she had no other means of obtain- ing a subsistence. Plenty of self-exhibited "pride and resent- ment" in all these traits ; much impolitic urgency ; much supe- riority of diction, and perhaps of feeling, calculated to exasperate the husband. It is very affecting and very saddening to see a wife complain of her husband's utter estrangement, while she avows "unalterable love ": " I cannot behold you," she says, " without emotion; my heart. still answers to your voice, my blood in my veins to your footsteps." Abandoned by her husband, se- edling him to the memory of her entire affection, he does not allege that she had diverted her affections to other objects : she remains without solace. But means more absolutely inapt to re- call the affections of such a man as she describes cannot be de- vised, than these which she relates on her own part. In the domestic tragedy, she appears, from her own account, to have borne herself with conscious superiority ; to have addressed a callous heart, perpetually, with dramatic and impassioned appeals; and to ha;;re mingled those appeals, so mortifying and embarras- sing to him, with squabbles about children's shoes and his man- ners, thus exposing herself to be crossed, whistled at, and placed in the most humiliating positions, before all sorts of people. The husband's self-betrayals are not less painful. The accusa- tions respecting the breach of the matrimonial compact are not distinctly contradicted ; the "nonchalance" is admitted by his counsel; in his own letters he speaks of " Mrs. Butler" with a hard- ness of manner the most revolting; he thinks fit to boast of "en- deavouring to make such changes in the management of his house- hold as shall enable her to live in the family," only she must "in no way interfere with the arrangements that he had made for the studies and 'education of the children"; he requires her to give up her friends—not only to leave off seeing them, but to be as a stranger to them " as if she had never known them": " I re- quire her to renounce, at once and for ever, those low-bred vulgar' meddlers the Sedgwicks "—his wife's chosen friends. In all this he thinks that he has "stipulated for nothing that is unusual or unnecessary,' bat only requires what is absolutely essential to the wellbeing and right government of every family. ' In one of his letters, addressed to Mrs. Ender, he says— "It is impossible to make any impression on one whose mental and moral obli- quity blinds her to all the vices of her nature, whose reason is sophistry and whose religion is cant, and whose unbounded self-esteem renders her happy and satisfied in all her wrongdoings." With more in the same strain, equally harsh, and still further removed from decent behaviour towards a woman. On the show- ing of his own acknowledged writing, Mr. Butler was tyrannical to A degree of brutality, ungenerous to meanness, cowardly to un- manliness.
Having stopped his wife's allowance, living apart, his object in suing for a divorce can only be to bar her claims on his purse. Unable to share her husband's home, Mrs. Butler professes to re- sist the divorce because it will damage her reputation, as it cer- tainly would damage the only claims in which she persevered— demands for money. To such a point was the humbling contest reduced I Whatever the issue of the law, it seems incapable of providing a true remedy for the evil on either side. If Mr. Butler succeed in obtaining divorce on the plea of a separation which he has compelled and sanctioned, it will violate every sense of justice; yet if he fail, the loss seems worse to his wife.
The law of Pennsylvania is, with slight differences, that of England : the marriage law Of England is based on that of a barbarous age. It, is not enlightened by Modern experience or judgment; it is not based on the facts of married .life; nor does it fit the actual state of society. It ignores rights which opinion universally admits; it maintains rights which opinion has ceased to recognize. It does not make authority correspond strictly. with responsibility. It is wholly onesided. Hence a perpetuation of ' claims to moral subjection which have no basis in the living realities of life; hence a premium to the incessant assertion of a baseless authority, and to a corresponding rebellion. The dread of shame keeps secret much of the misery caused by the jar be- tween obsolete laws and present usage : but when, as in a case like that before us, some unhappy couple are dragged before the public, every eye is turned upon them,—the bold, with hope of some, precedent for improvement.; the timid, with an invidious pleasure at seeing those who have braved publicity remanded back to suffering.
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